


A Reflection on Fathers

by alyssakay347



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail Lives, Abigail's Point of View, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Development, Character Study, Family Feels, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 03:55:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5897320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyssakay347/pseuds/alyssakay347
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal once said that he was nothing like Garrett Jacob Hobbs, but Abigail has her doubts as she tracks him in Italy. Will Graham is someone Hannibal wants to kill, wants to consume, and yet, wants to keep forever. His golden ticket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Reflection on Fathers

Abigail still remembered what happened after her father attacked her. Or at least, what happened after she woke up in the hospital. She remembered hating the nurses. She remembered wanting more than anything to leave. She remembered being haunted by her lookalikes at all hours. She remembered feeling like her father was watching over her. 

She remembered Alana Bloom and Freddie Lounds and Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, whose words all tangled in her mind. That she was repulsed by Alana Bloom, who so blatantly misunderstood her from the very beginning. Abigail didn't need a coddling adult figure to pad her from reality, she didn't need _gift cards_. 

She remembered her similar frustration with Will Graham, who so wanted to believe Abigail was something she knew she wasn’t. And she remembered Hannibal Lecter, who seemed content letting her wonder what she was instead of deciding for her. For him, Abigail felt a misguided gratitude—misguided because Hannibal wasn't waiting for her to define herself. He was waiting for her to understand that she was already defined. That she was exactly what she feared.

In retrospect, it made sense that Abigail hadn’t taken an immediate dislike to Freddie Lounds, despite the woman’s obvious agendas; it made sense Abigail kept in contact. Freddie had only wanted to hear her story and didn’t give a rat’s ass about what she was deep down.

She remembered when bits and pieces of buried memories resurfaced, hazy tableaus puzzling together into scenes, such as Will and Hannibal bowing over her on her kitchen floor. Will shaking like a leaf, and Hannibal still as stone. 

Abigail remembered their visit to the hospital and listening to Will’s vehement words on the hospital's park-style bench, assuring her of the ugliness of killing. Abigail imagined that she believed them, at the time. She certainly didn't believe whatever Hannibal might have said; if she did, she would have remembered. All she remembered about him on that visit was that his small mask of sympathy could have never hoped to cover the size of his indifference. 

It was a visit from a lifetime ago, between three people that no longer existed. 

Abigail still remembered another of her most fateful nights, second only to that day she nearly died at her father’s hand. It was at Hannibal’s home in Baltimore, when everything was down to the wire and the wire was snapped in half. 

Hannibal demanded she stay upstairs, but she fled the moment she smelled trouble coming from the kitchen. When she left through the front, she spared a look into the dining room window and was horrified to see Hannibal stab Will, practically gut him, and then, embrace him. 

She wondered if it was as unplanned and desperate an act as murdering Nicholas Boyle was. But the resignation in Hannibal's eyes, and the regret in Will's, was too powerful for that theory. Abigail could almost hear Hannibal's voice from afar, telling Will that it would all be over soon.

Hannibal once insisted that he was nothing like Abigail’s father. But in that moment, as Abigail stared at the blood and sorrow and chaos, she knew he had never been so wrong. 

Abigail remembered escaping in the pouring rain.

  


  


_Abigail believed that the first step to avoiding someone was to know where that someone was. She tracked down Hannibal in Italy. But the second step she failed: to stay far away. Instead of that, Abigail moved to Italy with what little money her parents left her._

_She felt a strange attraction to Hannibal, as if she had imprinted on him. She was a lost hatchling, forever drawn to a vulture who happened to be there when she needed someone most._

_In Italy, Abigail kept discreet tabs on Hannibal while fighting a strong longing for him to know of her presence. The only reasoning that kept her from knocking at this door was that she had no way of knowing if Hannibal would show her mercy for running away, or only pretend to and kill her later._

_So she waited. Ever since her escape from Hannibal's home, Abigail suspected that having insight into her father would give her insight into Hannibal as well. And she knew her father on the deepest level without a doubt. On the deepest level, her father had no ill feeling, no remorse, no hesitation killing her mother. On the deepest level, her father had every remorse attempting to kill Abigail, despite his all-consuming need to kill her._

_It seemed that Hannibal Lecter had developed a similar tunnel vision. Just like her father, Hannibal had a sickness to him that had inevitably seeped into every intense emotion he had. And like her father, Hannibal was indeed capable of intense emotion._

_When Abigail found out about Will Graham’s lookalike visiting Hannibal’s villa, she knew all too well what the outcome would be._

_All too well._

  


  


While in Italy, Abigail became adept all kinds of things: things Alana Bloom would recoil from, Will Graham would deny her, and Hannibal Lecter would praise. She knew how to manipulate people, she knew how to commit petty crime without leaving evidence, and she knew how to attain any report she wanted from the FBI. Considering it was always in the headlines, the Red Dragon case was easy to follow. Easy until the end, anyway—when Will and Hannibal fell off a cliff, then the face of the Earth. 

After their disappearance, Abigail became a dedicated sleuth for information about them, and every one of her skills came in handy. In a way, she felt like an orphan, compelled to know who her true parents were, where they were, why they weren’t coming back for her. For days after their disappearance she waited. She didn’t accept that her kidnapper and her father’s murderer could truly be out of her world forever. Her blood hummed with anticipation, the fearful kind and thrilled kind alike. 

But then one day she returned to her villa and found Hannibal and Will sitting on her balcony. Abigail sat down with them and they talked about Italy. 

She felt inexplicable, unadulterated relief at seeing Hannibal again, but for Will she was more hesitant with how to feel. She decided to appreciate his presence. He would serve as a buffer between herself and Hannibal, and—if she knew nothing else about Will Graham—he would do anything protect her. 

Abigail was quit to note that Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter had changed far more than any report or news clipping could have told her. Will looked nothing like the fragile man she knew from before. When Abigail looked into his eyes, she no longer saw someone eternally uncomfortable in his own skin. Rather, Will looked as if he'd found his skin for the first time. It was in his eyes, the way he carried himself, in how rarely he hesitated. 

Hannibal changed, too. No longer was he the unerring villain with a soft spot for humoring people who interested him. Rather, Hannibal looked like a villain who was feeling uncomfortable in his own skin for the first time. It was in his eyes, the way he carried himself, the greater frequency of his hesitations. 

Abigail noticed it all, in both of them, and it confused her. She wondered why Will didn't seem to be noticing, but then again, she supposed Will was enjoying a mental freedom he probably hadn’t experienced ever in his life. And Hannibal seemed content to let him have that freedom, which confused Abigail even more. 

She offered them her guest room and the couch for as long as they needed, and they agreed to stay only until a more permanent plan was fully formed. The days, then weeks, passed uneventfully. Will and Hannibal acted almost as if they were no different from visiting relatives. Abigail tentatively accepted the possibility that Hannibal wasn't planning to kill her in the near future and Will wasn't hatching a plan to hide her away in some ambivalent safe place. Abigail continued to struggle, however, accepting the possibility that she may very well a family again.

Maybe it was because, in those first few weeks, there was a strange dissonance between all of them. Will had the pent up energy of a man ready to unleash his power. Hannibal had the satisfyingly drained energy of a man who finally finished a masterwork—his in the form of William Graham—and also of a man who fell off a cliff. Abigail was neither of these extremes, but she always went to sleep exhausted anyway. Her thoughts ran marathons all day, leaving her doubting and affirming and questioning and reaffirming. Then questioning some more. 

She wasn’t sure whether to support Will in his eagerness to begin his own career in "art" or support Hannibal in his suggestion to wait a while, lay low, and enjoy themselves in other ways while they reorganized. The police were still on high alert in the US and Europe, after all, and they were both still recovering from injuries. The fact that Hannibal had done a patchwork job of their injuries before finding Abigail didn’t exactly bode well for avoiding infection, but luckily, Abigail, with her hard-earned connections, had known of an Italian hospital that wouldn’t ask why their two newest patients looked exactly like the two men all over the news for escaping FBI clutches after murdering the Red Dragon. (Apparently masses believed that, despite arguments to the contrary, missing didn’t equal dead.)

Despite Abigail's decision to side with Hannibal about laying low, she felt a familiar eagerness well up inside her. It was a sensation somehow both distant and fiercely familiar.

  


  


_She hadn't known them for long, but she could tell: The attraction between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter is powerful. It’s their eye contact, the invisible electricity. She can feel the static._

_For Will, it’s a mental, magnetic attraction—a force that can’t keep his thoughts away from Hannibal for long. His unique brain can’t keep Hannibal stepping inside his psyche and refusing to leave. Abigail knows that his empathy disorder keeps him from feeling like himself much of the time, but with Hannibal, he's clearer. He's free, or so it feels. She can’t blame him for wanting that clarity as often as possible._

_For Hannibal, it’s hunger. He has a taste for human flesh, and he considers Will a magnificent specimen. But the hunger is anything but shallow or transitory; it's a hunger that dips into his soul. Hannibal has as much a want for companionship as anyone else, and his singular interest Will is obvious to Abigail every time he looks at him. Sometimes she imagines Hannibal is a fallen angel infatuated with a dying man with every potential to become a fallen angel, too._

_The things they could do together, Hannibal might say. And after Hannibal dragged the the man's fate from Heaven down to Hell, and the man slayed the Dragon there, they would both conclude that he had never belonged in Heaven in the first place. He would have been wasted there._

_All this Abigail reads from them in the moments between them, their arguments, and the way the intention of their words never matched the emotions in their eyes. She wonders if their attraction would end up killing them both._

  


  


The attraction between Will and Hannibal develops before Abigail’s eyes, evolving from how she understood it before. With Will’s mental magnet finally attached to its attractor, Will appears, at first, a little at a loss. Like a beggar who has come into millions and doesn’t know what to do. Like the loser who gets the girl to fall in love with him and isn't quite sure what comes next. The exhausting narrative of Will avoiding Hannibal, then pursuing him, then rejecting him, then pursuing him again, reached an end. The best end. What does a person do when he has everything he wants?

And Hannibal’s powerful hunger for Will, which had been sated more than once through sadism and violence, was festering again as a result of once again holding back and laying low in Italy. 

Abigail is old enough to drink, and Hannibal appreciates this. One night three months after she found Hannibal and Will on her balcony, they celebrate the first day neither Hannibal or Will show up on any channel, any newspaper, or any new internet article—for sheer lack of information, most likely. The reluctant consensus is that Lecter and Graham must have died with the Dragon, and so celebration is in order. Laying low has served its purpose, and their new life can truly begin. 

They drink too much because they don’t see why not. Hannibal waxes poetic on the new home he's found for them on the northeastern coast, but Will isn't so interested in that as he is in convincing Hannibal to tell them what he has in mind for a first kill. But Hannibal was tight lipped, and instead described some of his past kills, some the FBI never found. 

It kindles in Abigail a dull horror and sharp excitement. She realizes that when Hannibal said he wasn’t like her father, he was partially correct. Where her father was a loony daughter killer, Hannibal is a connoisseur of death. But Hannibal was still partially wrong—Later that night, when Abigail leaves Hannibal and Will to talk alone on the balcony, she spies Hannibal looking at Will yet again in the same way her father looked at her on a good day. With adoration, with need, with obsession, with fear, with love. 

Except Abigail has a hunch now that there may never come a moment where Hannibal’s love will be forced into a corner and crumpled to satiate again the constant hunger. Hannibal has too much self control, reinforced these days by his happiness with how things are. Will is happier, too. But in his case, it causes his self control to slip. 

From the shadows, Abigail watches Will lean in to kiss Hannibal under the waxing moon. As Hannibal returns the kiss like he’d been waiting all his life, Abigail immediately feels her hunch confirmed. 

Invisible but palpable, the strange dissonance Abigail had been feeling abruptly ends after that drunken kiss. Both Will and Hannibal have something new to occupy their minds, and Abigail is struck again with the feeling she's found a family. This time, she accepts it. 

In the days after their little celebration, Will’s expressions alternate often between utterly perplexed, boyishly lovestruck, slightly sick, and intensely aroused. Hannibal’s expressions waver only slightly between smugness and anticipation—and every once in a while, when he thinks no one is looking, tranquility. 

Hannibal gives the go-ahead for Abigail to start the move out process. Once her lease is dealt with, they all pack up what little Abigail wants to keep, wipe down everything of fingerprints, and begin the drive up north. The car is luxurious and the top is kept down and it makes Abigail feel more like a movie star than a murderer, just a little bit. 

The house is just as high scale, but smaller than Abigail expected. There's a balcony with a few of the sea, and it's even cozier than she hoped. It's all even more than she hoped. 

  


  


_Only when she met Hannibal did Abigail begin to truly question herself in a way she never had before._

_Always, she had hated the murders of her lookalikes. She hated her father for killing them, hated herself for going along with it. In and of itself, the situation had been horrific. But outside of the situation? Did she like killing animals and honoring every part of them? Was cutting through Nicholas Boyle like he was no better than her and her father’s hunt just simple defensive instinct? Did it matter what it was, if she had enjoyed it?Abigail wondered if Hannibal was rubbing off on her or if Hannibal was simply revealing a hidden part of her. It was impossible to tell._

_Abigail never missed the conflict and confusion in Will Graham's eyes when they looked into Hannibal's. And behind that conflict and confusion was a quiet, desperate reverence. Maybe he and Abigail were one in the same. Whether Hannibal brought out the worst in them or not, he also brought a source of connection and understanding into their lonely lives. It fostered something in them, something that made them feel powerful._

_Abigail knew what she wanted was someone to see the truth of her without punishing her for it. Hannibal saw the truth that she wasn’t innocent, and he didn’t turn her in. He wholeheartedly accepted her instead, even before she could accept herself._

_Will saw the truth, too, eventually. He was not nearly so accepting. But he didn’t turn her in._

  


  


Hannibal pulled Abigail aside and reminded her, in a roundabout way, that she would be sitting the first few out, so to speak. It went unsaid that he needed more time to get Will comfortable with the idea of her joining them. 

Abigail wasn’t sure how to feel it. She had killed before and wasn’t entirely averse to doing it again, especially if it was someone vile. Who would miss someone vile? Abigail missed her father sometimes, but it was bearable. It was penance.

Hannibal and Will left a few nights later for their first escapade, and they returned in the early hours of the morning _cleaner_ than when they left. Will’s eyes had still that same conflict and confusion Abigail was accustomed to seeing, but now those emotions were the quiet ones behind his reverence. 

Abigail and Hannibal exchanged a look, and Abigail smirked at him. But Hannibal’s expression was not as smug as she expected. In fact, he wore an expression she didn’t easily recognize at all, and she wondered if she should be concerned. Hannibal was most dangerous when he was unpredictable, after all. 

Will went to bed not long after they returned, his exhaustion as evident as his buzz. He and Hannibal didn't sleep in separate rooms anymore, but Hannibal didn't follow him. Instead, he lingered and sat in the armchair across from Abigail in the living room. 

Abigail asked, with as much nonchalance as she could manage, how the night went. But Hannibal remained silent. He didn't even meet her eyes. It was far enough out of character that Abigail gave in and asked what was wrong. Even then, it was a while before Hannibal finally answered. 

"I have always believed in God, Abigail," he said. "I always believed him to be a powerful, omniscient, heartless God."

Abigail waited for him to say more, but when Hannibal did not continue, she risked digging deeper. "Do you believe differently now?"

Hannibal grimaced slightly. "I have defied him in the worst ways," he muttered, almost as if to himself. "And yet I am ultimately rewarded." 

He paused, taking a slow, deep breath. He met Abigail's gaze. "Reconcile this has become more difficult with each moment that has passed since the Dragon fell. A heartless God would killed Will in the fall and let me live. A powerful God would have dropped the ceiling on my head just as I bowed it in a kiss. Happiness should have been ripped from me in the same way I have ripped it from others." Hannibal looked away again, out the window. "And yet here I sit, blessed enough in this life that, were all this were to be taken away in death, I would remain entirely at peace." 

Hannibal paused, and when he spoke again, it was with finality. "It's as if God has mistaken me for a saint, even as I embody sin itself."

"Maybe God isn’t so heartless," Abigail said softly. 

Hannibal understood that she wasn't willing to think of a real answer. It wouldn't do for them both to be lost. So instead, Hannibal gave her a small, genuine grin. 

"Perhaps if humans are diagnosed with cancer, I am cancer diagnosed with humanity." 

Abigail chuckled. "Does it hurt?"

"No." Hannibal grinned wider, like he was reminiscing. "And it won’t hurt, right up until the precise moment it will. But that is not what worries me." 

Abigail was no therapist, but she felt a little like what she imagined Bedilia du Maurier might feel like having this conversation. 

"What worries you, then?" 

"I worry that there never was a heartless God," Hannibal said, and Abigail was certain she had never heard him speak so plainly before. "I worry there is nothing to defy and there never was."

"So…" Abigail trailed off. "Tonight wasn’t satisfying?" 

Hannibal’s eyes suddenly brightened. He shook his head minutely. "On the contrary. It was, by all accounts, perfect." 

"That makes you suspicious," Abigail said, gaining momentum. "But God never gives rewards or punishments to the people who deserve them. If free will exists, then fate doesn't, and so who gets what is entirely our responsibility,"Abigail shrugged, smirking. "Maybe all that's true in the end is that God really does love all his children equally, and he loves you no less than he loves a saint." 

Abigail exhaled, and her smirk faded. She rested her chin on her hand. "Even if fate doesn't exist, God might still be touching our lives. So if he loves you no less than he loves a saint, why offer the saint more peace than you?" 

Hannibal's eyes smiled. "Do you feel like God is offering you peace?" 

Abigail blinked. She knew he was deflecting, but she let it go. "I’m still young. I have a lot of life left for God to offer me things."

"Indeed you do," Hannibal said, his smile growing. 

They were quiet for several minutes. Abigail expected Hannibal to leave, but he didn’t. It made her think that perhaps there was more he couldn’t voice on his own. 

So she asked, "Is there any point in defying a God that will love you regardless of what you do?" 

"I suppose not. But is there any point, either, in defying a heartless God whose will it is to exclude me from his masterpiece of tragic irony?" Hannibal sounded more thoughtful now than unsettled. "Perhaps that in itself is the irony."

"Well, what about defying the world?" Abigail asked. "The world _is_ his masterpiece, isn't it?"

For a fleeting moment, Hannibal looked at her with a flawless, fatherly love that made her heart lurch in her chest. "We can start with the world, if you like." 

Then Will appeared in the bedroom doorway and leaned against the frame. He stared at Hannibal expectantly. "Are you done with your long overdue mid-life crisis? It’s lasted nearly fifteen minutes."

Abigail raised her eyebrows at that, then snickered at Will’s surprised expression when Hannibal stood and pushed him roughly back into the bedroom. 

She wondered what Will and Hannibal had designed together. She wondered what they were planning to design next. She had some ideas herself, for a particularly vile banker she met in Venice.

  


  


_Where her father was a loving man corrupted by a monstrous hunger, Hannibal was a monstrous man corrupted by love. Where corruption killed Garrett Jacob Hobbs, Hannibal evolved to accommodate._

_They were all survivors of a shattering. Finally, their pieces had come back together._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. I love this show. (I also love comments...)


End file.
